It wasn't until 2005 that I actually started voting Tory. Not because I thought they would get in, not because I was especially fond of
Michael Howard, but because, presumably like a lot of other people in the country at the time, I totted up all the things the Labour party had done that I profoundly disagreed with: introducing top-up fees, banning fox-hunting, slashing the armed forces and introducing the most convoluted forms of accountability into the NHS, the police force and the schools system. Not forgetting the war, of course, and the pensions crisis. The friends of mine who decided to protest against the Government did so by voting for
Charles Kennedy, but when I told them I had no intention of being penalised by a ten per cent tax hike and had decided to vote for the Conservatives, I was treated like a man who had just admitted he not only enjoyed the music of
Phil Collins, but also kept bound volumes of illegal pornography in his attic.
